Investor Spotlight – Bluestar Innovation Partners

Bluestar Innovation Partners was established in 2016 to provide direct funding and mentorship from both the Jones Family and top executives on a variety of topics including operational guidance, strategic intent, access to capital, expert mode-marketing, branding, and go-to-market strategies.

Private investment funding is the focus of the company, which has its headquarters in Frisco, Texas. The company makes investments into a number of businesses that are active in the areas of technology, games, as well as health and fitness.

Bluestar Innovation Partners has gained recognition in a number of different regions throughout the state of Texas. Among these are their recent recognition as a nominee in the Investment Catalyst classification for the 2019 Tech Titan excellence award given out on August 23, 2019.

Key People

The following are some of the most influential people in the company’s continued success.

  • Robert Wechsler, Founder.
  • Jerry Jones, President/General Manager.
  • Stephen Jones, Executive Vice President/Player Personnel Director
  • Charlotte Jones Anderson, Executive Vice President/Chief Brand Officer
  • Chad Estis, Business Operations Executive Vice President
  • Jerry Jones Jr, Executive Vice President/Marketing and Sales Chief Officer
  • Tom Walker, BSIPartner
  • Jason Cohen, BSIPartner
  • Stuart Lodge, BSIPartner
  • Molly Slusher, BSIPartner/Gen. counsel
  • Matt Steffe, BSIPartner
  • Eric Frazier, President/ Business & Commercial Development Leader
  • Randy McGraw, BSIPartner
  • Jessica Jones, BSIPartner
  • Corey Wood, BSIPartner
  • Dan Wechsler, BSIPartner
  • Ben Kauder, BSIPartner
  • Andrew Shofner, BSIPartner
  • Brett Thier, BSIPartner
  • Tom Strachan, BSIPartner
  • Kevin Hughes, BSIPartner

Recent Investments

BSIP has a proven track record of success in identifying companies operating in a segmented marketplace that are failing at one idea that BSIP can improve upon. With this strategy, BSIP is able to add value in addition to the capital outlay.

Businesses located in northern Texas stand to gain a substantial amount of value from invested capital from BSIP. Getting supported by a collective that is deeply linked to the most senior management levels at the most important sports organisation in the universe confers a certain innate competitive edge. Specifically, this incentive comes in the form of the following:

In addition, the leadership team at BSIP is not only one of the greatest powerful professionals of its type in North Texas but also has a demonstrated record of successfully increasing tech firms. In fact, they may even be the most influential group in the region.

April 23, 2019

– Payrix  – became the lead investor with $22M raised money.

July 26, 2020

– received TravelNet Solutions

– had exit in Payrix

October 01, 2020

– Series A Payrix raised a total of $50M.

March 08, 2022

– invested in Stax ($245M)

Bluestar’s Mission

BSIP’s investment thesis is to engage in incredibly creative innovators and companies selling a service or product with an overall income between $3,000,000 and $50,000,000. This enables BSIP to enhance their expertise, access to dispersion and capital systems, and to provide different implementations with exceptional guidelines and value.

Bluestar Innovation Partners is currently working on a strategy to grow their industry by recruiting additional investors and partner organisations who share their commitment to a common goal. The company has held throughout its history the conviction that it is the essential component of a forward-thinking kind of enterprise that is able to appreciate the value of ongoing innovation.

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How Did Canva Become So Successful?

An Aussie Tech Startup Sensation – Canva, now one of the world’s leading web based design platforms actually started with humble beginnings. 

Today Canva averages 120 new designs being added each second and more than 7 billion designs in total.

Anyone with just a little graphic design expertise has likely come across this easy-to-use online tool to make stunning graphics. Canva’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface simplifies creating professional-looking graphics, social media, and advertising campaigns.

Canva has skyrocketed in popularity since its 2012 debut and now does business with some of the most significant companies in the world, like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Virgin, and over 10 million consumers have used it to make beautiful designs.

“As a leader, I feel my job is to set the vision and the goals for the company, and then to work with everyone to empower them to dream big and crazy,”

– Melanie Perkins.

From Humble Beginnings – Canva Founders

Melanie came up with the idea in 2007, when she was just 19, teaching graphic designing to a batch of students at a University in Perth, Australia.

Melanie and Cliff Obrecht, her Co-founder and to-be spouse, started by creating an online school yearbook design business, “Fusion Books,” to test their idea. Fusion books helped school students collaborate and design their profiles and articles. The yearbooks would then be printed and delivered to the students across Australia.

This initial proof of concept became quite successful and the launchpad for Canva.

It’s important to note that despite Canva’s now huge success, Melanie was turned down by over 100 investors when pitching her initial idea.

Melanie’s first breakthrough happened in 2011 when a longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist named Bill Tai came to Perth to judge a startup competition. A skilled kitesurfer who had backed TweetDeck and Zoom, Tai was in town mainly to play in Perth’s killer waves. Perkins and Obrecht sniffed out a dinner Tai was hosting and ambushed attendees with a pitch for something called Canvas Chef: a metaphorical pizza, with design elements as the toppings and document types—flyer, business card, restaurant menu—as the dough. “It wasn’t the most stylish analogy,” says Rick Baker, an investor who saw the pitch that night.

They didn’t secure funding initially but left a mark on Tai. With the help of common connections, Melanie succeeded in getting Cameron Adams, on-board as a Tech Co-Founder and Dave Hearnden as a Tech Developer.

First Capital Investment

Now with a credible Tech Lead, they managed to raise $3 million in seed funding in two tranches in 2012 and early 2013, including a crucial matching grant from the Australian government.

The trickle of sign-ups grew to 50,000 users in the first month; by 2014, when Canva raised another $3 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and Shasta Ventures, 600,000 users had made 3.5 million designs.

Essentially, Canva’s success can be due to its ease and versatility. The company’s revenue came from a freemium model with the option to upgrade to a $10-a-month premium version with snazzier features.

In 2019, Canva raised an $85 million funding round led by Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital, which valued Canva at $3.2 billion.

Exponential Revenue

After 7 years of building towards a grand vision, their growth happened fast:

  • 1 million users in 2014.
  • 6 million users in 2015.
  • 2 billion+ designs made in 2020.
  • On track for $1 billion+ annualised revenue in 2021.

Canva’s quick expansion may be attributed partly to the company’s dedication to improving the user interface and attracting new customers. The business has spent a lot of money on advertising and new product creation, which has paid off in the form of a sizable customer base. The income goals that Canva has set are aggressive yet realistic. With its healthy growth rate and customer-centric approach, the firm is in an excellent position to achieve its objectives.

Company Growth

Canva has grown exponentially since its start in April 2013. Expanded to over 300 people in Australia, the US, and the Philippines serving over 10 million customers in 190 countries. 

It’s incredible to see how far it’s come as a business when looking back at initial staffing levels. Canva has grown from a small group to a staff of over 300 employees. 

The Canva team is now 2000+ and continues to grow as Canva expands to new markets in China, Dubai, and the Philippines.

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Free Keyword Research Tool

Brand New – This new keyword research tool will help you discover related keywords and build a highly targeted keyword list.

Free Keyword Research Tool

You can also generate a list of modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match keyword variations ready to paste into Google Adwords.

I was using this functionality in other apps but figured it would be useful as a standalone tool. It doesn’t have search volumes or other SEO metrics. At the moment it’s purely for generating keyword ideas.

The idea behind this tool is to discover keyword variations and then paste those keywords into Google Keyword Planner for click estimates. Most people will know the main keywords they need to target, but will be stuck for variation ideas.

If you have some suggestions for useful features or additions, please let me know in the comments or click the Feedback button on the site.

It’s so easy to go overboard with features when developing these tools. I wanted to keep it very simple to start with and build based on user feedback. If there’s enough interest, I will keep developing it, so please let me know your thoughts and suggestions.

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Exploring UX: Little Things That Make Big Differences

The digital landscape is changing so quickly with new technologies, internet speed, mobile device capabilities etc. It can be overwhelming to think of everything you need to keep up to date with when developing a website. 

The more I look at various eComm websites and the marketing strategies vendors are using to acquire new customers, the more I am noticing the importance of good UX design.

Near enough is not good enough when it comes to conversion rates and profitability. Increasing your site performance by just 0.1% is actually a big deal when you are getting a good volume of traffic. As your site traffic grows it can mean the difference between profitability and bankruptcy.

In the next series of articles I’m going to look at various UX elements and the impact they have on user experience and conversion rates. I think there is a lot to be explored in this area and the opportunity for improvement is huge. I believe most vendors would not be aware of what is possible, and are simply confined to what their particular software platform options allow. 

When you push outside of what is the norm, you start to see dramatic results. When everybody copies an idea, it becomes less effective as users get used to seeing it across multiple different sites. 

There is something to be said for keeping to patterns that users are used to though. Simple things like putting the search bar in the top right of your website. Keeping the ‘Go’ or submit button to the right of a search field rather than assuming they will know the enter key performs the same function. When you mess with these patterns, you simply confuse and annoy users and you’ll find your conversion rates drop. 

Good UX increases come by experimenting with new ways to engage users and make their experience with your desired end result as easy as possible. Overcome their objections before they even think of them and test new interaction elements to increase engagement.

I invite you to come on a journey with me as we explore the world of UX for websites and apps on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. As these devices all have their own unique experience, it is crucial to look at your website or app separately on each device and how a user might be interacting with your content.

To be specific, we’re going to look at how we can utilise UX design in conjunction with emotional buying triggers. Fear, time, trust, value, belonging, guilt, instant gratification, leadership, and competition. Humans don’t make choices based on logic, we make them based on emotions. By leveraging UX elements that trigger these emotions you can increase your conversion rates dramatically.

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The Killer Youtube Boosting Strategy

***Disclaimer*** Google has changed the game on this tactic. They no longer publish pagerank scores. The toolbar has been disabled, and ‘follow’ links on Youtube have been pruned to a minimum.

Having said that, it doesn’t mean links from authority sites to your own website or social channels won’t boost your SEO score anymore.

This was a killer strategy back in the day for effectively sculpting pagerank from high pagerank channels on Youtube to your own channels in a very short period of time.

A quick lesson on links and link building:

There is such a thing as “follow” and “nofollow” links. I’m sure you are familiar with hyperlinks so I won’t bore you with the basics, but here’s a quick explanation. In the html code behind a link it can have an attribute tag of rel=”nofollow”. If that is present then the link won’t pass any “link juice” to the url it is linking to.

A quick lesson on “link juice”:

Google gives every url (webpage) on the internet a value. This use to be called “pagerank”. It ranges from 0 to 10. If you have a link pointing to your website from a web page with a pagerank of e.g. 7, that is more valuable than a link from a page with a pagerank of 3.

The great thing about social sites or websites that allow you to create your own page or content on their domain is that they usually already have high pagerank.

The strategy is to then link out to your own domains from those pages or content you created on high pagerank domains.

Youtube for example had a pagerank of 9 on their homepage. Popular channels would have a pagerank of 5 to 7.

If you got a link on that page that pointed to your own website then your pagerank would increase quite quickly and you would be ranked higher.

Thing is… you couldn’t link to your own website. If you put in a url in the comments section it would have the rel=”nofollow” tag on it.

BUT…

What you could do was leave a comment on a channel page. Didn’t matter what the comment was. The point was that it would automatically link back to your own Youtube channel as the comment author. That link was a follow link.

That meant that you could take your brand new Youtube account channel pagerank from 0 up to 3 in about a week, and if you commented on a few more high pagerank profiles you would be on a pagerank 5 in about two weeks.

Taking it a step further. There was one section on Youtube where you could link out to your own website with a follow link. That was in the settings where you get to specify your own website urls. So if you did the work to build up your channel pagerank then your own website urls would get passed some link juice as well.

The other benefit to this was obviously publishing videos. As your channel was building pagerank quickly, your videos would get priority in the search results. Then if your videos were keyword targeted you would also rank in Google search for those videos. This exponentially increased the views you received. From there if you recommended a url or program in your video, you could link to it in the description and get a boat load of traffic.

See why this was a killer Youtube boosting strategy?

So, now that Youtube has disabled some of the effectiveness of this tactic, what do you do now?

Well, like I said initially there is still merit in finding pages where you can get a follow link. Download this chrome extension which will highlight “follow” and “nofollow” links on any web page. this makes it much easier for you to discover them.

Also…. little teaser. Check out Google+ for potential links.

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The Best WordPress Plugins For Your Community Website

As WordPress is becoming the platform of choice for websites, it’s no longer just a blogging tool. People are using WordPress for many varied functions. One of those is building a community. It makes sense wanting to leverage the power of your own website to integrate members and have them be able to post content. There are a few ways to do this but the trick is to make the process as seamless as possible for your users. Read more

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Sorting Trello Cards By Priority Across Multiple Boards

I use trello.com in my business, and I find it a great tool for organising information and assigning tasks to team members.

The only thing we find is that when managing multiple boards (projects) at once, there isn’t a way of seeing the most important tasks across all projects on one screen.

Fortunately… my business is software development, and one of our guys whipped together a cool little script that will reorganize anyone’s personal cards page by “Labels”, meaning that we can now see the highest priority tasks across multiple projects.

Would you like to use this cool little script?

Drag this link to your bookmarks bar -> Sort Trello Cards by Priority

To use this script you will need to navigate to your personal cards page – i.e https://trello.com/{yourusername}/cards – replace {yourusername} with your actual Trello username (or click the “Cards” link in the menu)

*Nice little bonus – This script will also remove the “Done” tasks so you are only seeing the tasks that are yet to be completed.

Here’s how we typically setup our Trello Boards:

organising-trello-cards

We create 5 “Lists” – To Do, Doing, Review, Done, Notes

My process is to create new cards/tasks in the ‘To Do’ column and assign it to a team member. That team member will then drag the task to the ‘Doing’ column when they start working on it. They will move the card to the ‘Review’ column when they have completed it. I’ll then review the tasks, add notes and either put it back on the ‘Doing’ column or move it to the ‘Done’ column. We store FTP logins, and any other important info in the ‘Notes’ column for easy access.

To use the script above, just add a label to your tasks (You don’t need to name them in trello. The top label corresponds to top priority) – It’s a hassle naming labels across multiple boards (they don’t save from one to the next) so don’t worry about naming them unless you really want to.

Then navigate to your ‘Cards’ page and click the ‘Sort Trello Cards by Priority’ bookmark link.

Your page will reorganize to something like this (I have removed the actual cards to protect my clients privacy… but you get the idea):
sorted-trello-cards

If you like this handy script, please leave your comment below and let me know?

Thanks
Mike

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How I Increased My Site Speed By 36% in 5 Minutes

Are you leaving money on the table because your site takes too long to load?

The stats say that people will wait up to 2 seconds for your page to load before they click the ‘back’ button and leave forever. This obviously has a direct relationship to your conversion rates.

[leadplayer_vid id=”51A341EAABEA1″]

It would make most marketers cringe to think they might be losing sales just because people are exiting their pages before they finish loading.

In this post I’m going to show you how I decreased the page load time on my landing page by 36%.

The site I use in this example is http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

You can see in this first screenshot that my page was taking 1.56 seconds to load:

increase page speed 1

 

Immediately I notice a few things slowing the page down here:

  • broken links
  • requests to external sites
  • large image files

Broken Links

This was a result of copying code from another site of mine in the aim of getting the page up quick. I was more concerned about speed of implementation rather than technical perfection at that point but this could be happening on your site too without you realising it.

What this meant was that my static page was trying to access a file that didn’t exist and therefore triggering my whole WordPress installation to load it’s standard 404 error page. Users wouldn’t see this of course, and either did I but nevertheless it added unnecessary page load time. The whole point of this static page was to be lightweight and not include all the random stuff WordPress loads that I didn’t need.

Fixing that issue saw my page load time go from 1.56 seconds down to 1.33 seconds.

increase page speed 2

 

Requests To External Sites

Next thing to look at was the external requests my page was making. I’m using Leadplayer on this page, with a Getresponse form and I have a few social icons that are making requests to their respective sites as well.

The main element slowing down the page was actually the Facebook button. Google +, Pinterest, & Twitter were loading much faster so I decided to remove the Facebook connect option as this page is primarily loading in a Facebook tab anyway.

Large Image Files

The last element or the last major contributing factor to the page speed was the background image. It’s quite big as it’s not designed to repeat horizontally or vertically so it scales with the page and therefore needs to be of decent resolution to look good on larger screens.

Once again as this page is loading in a Facebook tab, the background image doesn’t add a whole lot of design appeal. Most of it isn’t seen anyway as the content is scaled to the maximum width of the tab so I decided to remove this element for now.

Here’s the final result:

increase page speed 3

 

So from a couple quick observations and adjustments, my page now loads 36% faster according to pingdom.com.

If you would like me to help you out with your site speed and page load times, please feel free to hit me up.

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Which Is The Best Split Testing Software?

If you are at the stage where you are split testing your web pages… Firstly, I congratulate you. Only the most successful online business owners are split testing.

Choosing which software to use can be a daunting decision. Since Google decided to drop Google Website Optimiser, the playing field has become much more abundant with third party tools.

There is of course Google Content Experiments (free inside Google Analytics) which has replaced Website Optimiser but it doesn’t have multivariate testing like Website Optimiser did. I find that to be a big downfall. I’m not 100% sure on the reason Google decided to drop Website Optimiser or multivariate testing but it has meant a lot of people have been searching elsewhere for a full-fledged split testing tool.

Here’s a quick rundown of the tools I have tried and my experience with them:

Google Content Experiments

googlecontentexperimentsThis is pretty straight forward to use, although you will need some tech skills to modify your website pages. I find it best to use with static pages, not CMS sites. Essentially you create multiple variations of your pages on your web server, and Content Experiments will redirect users to each variation and then compile the results in a nice graph for you.

So, for example, you would setup index.php, indexb.php, indexc.php, indexd.php etc. on your webserver and specify those urls to Google. You can see an example of how I used Google Content Experiments here.

The drawbacks of Google Content Experiments are:

  • It doesn’t do multivariate testing.
  • You need to manually create duplicate versions of your pages.
  • There’s no built-in editor.

The advantages are:

  • It’s built into Google Analytics.
  • The reporting is quite nice and simple.
  • It will run a test for a e.g. 2 week time frame, and then tell you which variation is the winner.
  • You don’t get issues with built-in editors. Sometimes manually creating duplicate pages can be less hassle.

Optimizely

optimizelyThis is quite a premium tool. When I started using this, I was impressed with their visual editor and how easy it was to use. There’s quite a lot of options in their editor which I haven’t seen in other software. They do offer multivariate testing but it’s not included in their basic package. It’s quite a big price jump from the basic package. $350 per month for the multivariate testing package.

This could almost be used as a metrics tool as they allow you to setup “Goals” such as clicks on various page elements, visits to specific pages, and also “Revenue Tracking” which means you can test your different variations and determine which version returns the most dollars for you. Very handy feature to have.

Another cool feature is it’s integration with Crazyegg. All you need is your API key from Crazyegg and Optimizely will do the rest. The great thing about this is that Optimizely will create separate Crazyegg snapshots for each of your split-test variations so you can accurately measure engagement on each test rather than guessing with one general snapshot.

Disadvantages:

  • Pricey for the multi-variate package

Advantages:

  • Great visual editor
  • Easy to Use
  • Integrates easily with Clicktale, and Crazyegg
  • Integrates easily with Google Analytics (Goals)
  • Revenue Tracking

Experiment.ly

experimentlyI found this site when looking for a multi-variate alternative to Optimizely. Initially, this site looked great as they include multi-variate testing in all their packages and the prices are very reasonable. Another feature they have is heatmap tracking built-in. Awesome!

I ran into a snag when I started testing though. For some reason their visual editor didn’t display my page correctly. It looked as if it was missing a style sheet and wasn’t displaying some CSS3 elements so I couldn’t actually finish setting up the test I wanted to run. I hit another snag when I tried to upgrade my account. It gave me an API error their checkout. Didn’t make a great impression. I did submit support tickets and they did get back to me within 24 hours though.

They wanted me to disable some other javascript I had running on the page to fix the CSS elements, but by that time, I had already moved on to Visual Website Optimizer which worked flawlessly on first run so I haven’t bothered as of yet.

Disadvantages:

  • Visual editor seems not quite up to par.
  • Perhaps not quite as big a company as one would like.

Advantages:

  • Cheap Pricing on packages
  • Heat Map tracking built-in
  • Easy to use interface

Visual Website Optimizer

visualwebsiteoptimizerAs explained, I tried this software after having issues with Experiment.ly. Very easy to setup an account. Visual editor worked great. Does multi-variate tests in the free-trial. Packages seem quite reasonably priced. Includes Heat Map tracking as well.

I’m using this software right now, and running an ad campaign through Facebook. I’ll post more details to this blog post as we go.

The only snag I hit with this software, was when adding combinations to my multi-variate test. I have about 5 different sections on my page which I want to test and I got up to 640 possible combinations quite quickly which in turn made Visual Website Optimizer very slow to use.

Disadvantages:

  • Site runs very slow when combinations increase

Advantages:

  • Easy to use
  • Heat Map Tracking
  • Multivariate testing in Free Trial
  • Reports seem quite intuitive so far

Hope you enjoyed this post. Please add your comments below and if you would like to get in contact with me, please hit the “Contact Me” button at the top of this page.

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